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1 3 Google Glass Pleiten met een slimme bril op je neus 16 Anna Wil weer een zesjarig kind zijn met een onbevangen blik 4 Hero Jessurun d Oliveira taught René de Groot to look at law critically 4 Approved Simply take a snapshot of the whiteboard 34 Onafhankelijk weekblad van de Universiteit Maastricht Redactieadres: Postbus MD Maastricht Jaargang 35 4 juni 2015 Eerste van zeven gele kaarten Fasos ingetrokken Het eerste goede rapport over de kwaliteit van de opleidingen bij de faculteit cultuur- en maatschappijwetenschappen (Fasos) is binnen. De commissie die moet adviseren over de heraccreditatie van de master mediastudies is tevreden over de verbeteringen die de programmaleiding heeft doorgevoerd. Daarmee is deze gele kaart van de baan en dus ook de dreiging dat de overheidsgeldkraan dichtgedraaid zou kunnen worden. De Nederlands- Vlaamse Accreditatieorganisatie (NVAO) moet nog wel het definitieve groene licht geven. Bij de faculteit is opgelucht gereageerd nu de eerste hobbel is genomen: in de afgelopen tijd kregen zeven van haar opleidingen een waarschuwing dat de kwaliteit op een bepaald punt, veelal de eindscripties, onder de maat was en dat maatregelen nodig waren. Het heeft bij Fasos tot nogal wat spanningen geleid, en tot een enorme inspanning om het onderwijs anders in te richten; zie daarvoor pagina 7 tot en met 10 in deze Observant. De commissie die bij Fasos naar mediastudies keek, is goed te spreken over de curriculumherziening en de strengere eisen die aan scripties worden gesteld, onder meer de verplichting om vooraf een onderzoeksplan in te dienen. Men spreekt over een substantiële verbetering en aantoonbaar betere scripties dan in 2013 bij het begin van het beoordelingsproces werden aangetroffen. De faculteit verwacht eind van dit kalenderjaar uitsluitsel over de meeste andere opleidingen met een gele kaart. Intussen ligt de manier waarop de NVAO haar waakhondfunctie uitoefent en tot (her)accreditatie van opleidingen besluit, al langer onder vuur. Onder meer het feit dat een onvoldoende op één punt een afkeuring van de hele opleiding impliceert, oogst wrevel. In Vlaanderen is de onvrede zo groot dat daar binnenkort besloten wordt de aparte opleidingsaccreditaties acht jaar lang op te schorten en alleen nog instellingsaccreditaties, dus van de universiteit of hogeschool als geheel, te gaan doen. In Nederland pleit minister Bussemaker ook voor een herziening van het stelsel (zie pagina 3). Wammes Bos A stupendous workload, ridiculous solver hours, a culture of fear, a top-down structure. For some time, messages have been reaching Observant some in the form of s, others in letters that were literally pushed under the door - about Arts and Social Sciences; a faculty that is trying hard to eliminate seven unsatisfactory marks issued by the education watchdog NVAO. The first for Media Studies - has already been remedied. What is true of all those rumours, Observant s editorial board wondered. Over the past few months, we spoke with 37 employees and a number of students. Read the first part of the article in English on page 5. For the full story in English, please visit Dutch version: pages 7-10 Photo: Joey Roberts/Illustration: Simone Golob 300,000 for Student and City The Maastricht city council aims to invest 300,000 in the Student and City programme, focused on improving the integration of students in the city. The plan is outlined in the Kaderbrief, a memo setting out the key points of the council s financial plans. The Student and City programme is a partnership between Maastricht University, Hogeschool Zuyd and various student organisations. It was given the green light in December 2013, but has so far not had its own dedicated budget. The council plans to give the programme an extra boost by way of investments worth 150,000 each in 2016 and The funding is to be put towards events such as the celebration of the 40th anniversary of Maastricht University in 2016, the annual open days, the Week of Entrepreneurship and the INKOM (the introduction week for new students, held each year in August). According to the council, the funding should allow new projects to be developed quickly and flexibly. The investment plan will be submitted to the councillors for approval. Various initiatives have already been launched within the Student and City programme. A special Student and City councillor has been installed. MyMaastricht.nl, an English-language portal for international students with information on transport, healthcare, finances and housing, is now online. Workplaces for student organisations have been created on the Gebroeders Hermansstraat, and in 2017 an International Students Club will kick off in the Timmerfabriek. Wendy Degens

4 4 Observant 34 4 juni René de Groot inspired by Hans-Ulrich Jessurun d Oliveira In an orange suit and wearing an Afghan chain Whether it was a coincidence or not, last week Jaap Cohen, son of the former UM rector Job Cohen, obtained his doctorate with distinction in Amsterdam for his dissertation on the history of a Portuguese-Jewish family. It is the family of professor Hans-Ulrich Jessurun d Oliveira LL M, the almost 82-yearold legal expert who taught the young René de Groot now himself a professor of Comparative Law and Private International Law in Maastricht to look at law critically. He taught Philosophy of Law and Comparative Law in Groningen. The motto for his students was: don t just look at how the rules are set up and how the Supreme Court deals with them. Always ask yourself whether you agree with the rules and think about how the rules should be. With a broad grin, De Groot recollects a lecture in Comparative Law that started out with a full lecture hall. When it appeared that the compulsory literature included a book in French, there were soon only two students left. Soon enough, that person left too and I received private tuition. Thinking for yourself, and certainly not wishing to push your standards and values on society. That was the second wise lesson from the man he almost lovingly refers to as Ulli : Have respect for others. By now his teacher has become his sparring partner (and friend) when it comes to Nationality Law, De Groot s field of specialisation. We are both very interested in it and constantly discuss the subject: how should this law develop in the world? Jessurun d Oliveira is not exactly the mousey type, De Groot grins. He was and is a very flamboyant person. I will never forget when he had just been appointed professor. I was in the library when a fellow-student tapped me: look there goes the new professor. Orange suit, Afghan chain, we were not used to that in the Groningen of Years later, at De Groot s doctoral degree ceremony at the UM, Jessurun d Oliveira, who worked in Florence at the time, appeared in a Maastricht gown. He had borrowed it. But he didn t wear the accompanying cap. Instead he walked into the auditorium wearing a trilby on his head. De Groot himself is known as the professor in cape and cap: Maybe we are alike after all. There is one field in which he cannot equal his teacher, says De Groot. He has an extraordinarily beautiful style of writing, it is a joy to read his work. He is also well known as a literary man, has published poems and written reviews. He proves that a legal expert s writing doesn t need to be dry as dust. I learned a lot from him Photo: Joey Roberts/Illustration: Simone Golob in that respect, although my epistles are boring compared to Ulli s. No matter how beautiful his style of writing is, there were times when his outright manner of speaking shocked many a student in Groningen. De Groot, laughing again: Then Ulli would say: I think the Supreme Court is screwing things up in this case. Riki Janssen Approved 4Microsoft Office Lens 4Office/practical/study 4Free 4Android, ios You no longer need to copy the lecturer s notes on the whiteboard by hand. Using Microsoft Office Lens you simply take a snapshot of the whiteboard, which the app then turns into a document. You can choose the document format, the options including PDF, Word and PowerPoint. It is not even necessary to stand right in front of the board. The app recognises where the written text is and captures it. A paper document is easy to scan too. Simply switch from whiteboard to document in the option menu and take a picture. Having opened the scan in Word, you are able to enter your own text in it. If you have lost the file containing your essay, but you previously printed it, you can reconstruct your file using Office Lens scans. The app automatically saves scanned documents in the Microsoft cloud OneDrive. CF Latest news on Become member of facebook.com/ ObservantUM Last week, while hanging around Maastricht, I ran into several contemporary art events and expositions. I stopped at some of them, just the time for a quick peek. As usual when it comes to contemporary art, I felt first amused, then confused, and finally irritated by my inability to understand it. As maybe many other people, I have always struggled to perceive the beauty behind a piece of contemporary art, to find it interesting at times, to see it as art. I always happen to use as a measure of comparison the great classics, such as Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raffaello, and Donatello (not to be confounded with the ninja turtles here). Artists who showed through their jobs the greatness of their skills. People so talented to The meaning of art make a piece of stone looking as real as skin, or as light as fabric, and paintings and frescoes so beautiful to bewitch the human soul. And when looking at contemporary art, the obvious question comes up: Where is the skill?, and sometimes the unavoidable consideration: I could have done it myself. But then, with a little bit of thinking, and some help from Francesco Bonami, it s not too difficult to realize that contemporary art is no more a question of skills, but of concepts. Art nowadays has become more and more a means to transmit ideas and emotions, and the good artist is the one who makes this transmission intriguing, and as natural as possible, and the one who makes it first. It s more about creativity, and no more ability, no more about replicating the world, but give life to something really new. The question then translates to: What is the artist communicating to me?, and as a by-product the viewer becomes integral part of the artistic process. I found myself to like this new way of meaning and interpreting art. It seems to me that everybody nowadays could potentially become an artist. It sounds like a more socialistic way of accomplishing art. Pietro Bonizzi, Assistant Professor at Knowledge Engineering

5 4 juni 2015 Observant 34 5 english Portrait of a faculty in turbulent times Is it really that bad on the Grote Gracht? What is going on with the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, a.k.a FASoS? Within a year, seven yellow cards were issued by the national inspectorate NVAO ( a beating, we were terribly shocked, says an employee) and then the stories come out. Some are told in all openness and some literally pushed under the door of the Observant editorial office. That the faculty is divided into camps, that staff are on the brink of being overworked, that you could cut the atmosphere with a knife, that people are afraid to express themselves mainly because the management style is top-down, and so on. And also that this was bound to happen, that education has been neglected for years. What is the truth in all these stories? Is it really that bad on the Grote Gracht? Photo: Joey Roberts Autumn The judgement passed by the Accreditation Organisation of the Netherlands and Flanders (NVAO) was rigorous: six of the seven programmes assessed were substandard and rejected. If matters remained unchanged, the government would withhold funding. The verdict came like a bombshell. Initial reactions on the Grote Gracht varied from disbelief to resistance and vexation. We were angry at the committee, we felt that we were not able to explain properly how we do things here, says Sylvia Haerkens, a policy officer supervising the recovery process. Tannelie Blom, professor of European Studies, is still critical: This committee assessed a European Background and procedure For the past eighteen months, several complaints have reached Observant about the culture, atmosphere and workload at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (or FASoS), a faculty that is trying hard to eliminate seven unsatisfactory marks issued by the education watchdog NVAO. To see whether the image that was being created was correct, Observant spoke to (or received information from) 37 employees, mostly academic staff but also support staff and a small number of students. Observant also approached more individuals, but not everyone wanted to co-operate. I mostly work elsewhere and I am not aware of what is going on, I have no opinion, I don t think this is the right moment, because the faculty is working hard now, were some of the replies. Some want to remain completely anonymous, others do not want to be referred to by name. Dean Rein de Wilde was given the opportunity to react. This article was written on the basis of the interviews and a number of documents. It is divided into chapters set up around the main themes: yellow cards, culture based on fear, workload, and top-down management style. Studies programme while not one of its members has ever had anything to do with ES. The same goes for PBL. Here at the UM, there are always two obstacles with external committees: PBL and the interdisciplinary nature of programmes. We are measured against their own discipline, but a historian sets different requirements than a political scientist. Professor Thomas Christiansen: I have worked in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Europe. Our academic year is the longest of them all, we have the highest number of contact hours. Our programme is the largest in Europe, we are growing each year, whereas numbers have decreased elsewhere. Then a committee of five people turn up thinking that they know better. That is absolutely outrageous. Exhausted There were other recriminations regarding the committee too. They implied, after all, that the faculty was too easy-going, too tolerant with regard to theses assessments. Not at all, feels historian Ernst Homburg: You deliver an individual to society, and then you have to assess the process, the growth potential. Just looking at the final product is a neoliberal accountant s approach. I don t tally. But now we have to be stricter. Look, I had someone who had carried out rather complicated research, using 17 th -century sources, I felt that it was worth a 7. It was just that the formulation of the theory and the presentation of the question could have been better, but it was compensated by the other chapters. The second reader, however, pressured by the committee s criticism, gave a five. Fortunately there was a third assessor who gave a pass. Things could have turned out different. No matter what, the reason why we received yellow cards for this, is because of people like me. Philosopher Maarten Doorman adds: I am not saying that all theses were that good, but the mercy passes (in Dutch: genadezes), the fact that everyone is so against those now, makes them sound really firm and tough. But how is it possible that a student whom you teach for three years has trouble getting a six for a thesis? Then something is wrong with your programme. And it happens often enough that a student understands the material well enough, but cannot put it down on paper properly. That is why the mercy pass exists. But that is not allowed anymore. Later on, the atmosphere in the faculty changed; maybe what the auditing committee said wasn t so crazy. First we went on the defence, says professor Sjaak Koenis. But indeed, not all theses were good. The grade didn t just reflect the product, but also the process. According to historian Georgi Verbeeck there was more. FASoS never really properly digested the switch to the bachelor s/master s structure. The bachelor s became a final station, for which we were insufficiently prepared. Before the BA/ MA system, we asked students to write an essay, which became an academic paper. This requires a different approach. The assessment committee judged our final pieces on the basis of criteria that we were not prepared for. What was worse, say other members of staff, the faculty had been warned. Already in March 2008 a group of seven lecturers from the Arts and Culture programme (CW) sounded the alarm. In a letter to the faculty board, they wrote that the workload had reached a critical limit because of the increasing pressure of regulations and the substantial economising on teaching hours in recent years. Lecturers lose faith in the faculty, feel exhausted, overworked and unappreciated. They protest against the erosion of the education programme. They believe that good-quality teaching is hardly possible anymore in the hours allocated. Feedback on papers and theses suffered and is regularly done through . They feel that education is becoming an item at the bottom of the list, mainly good for losers. What didn t do (interdisciplinary) education any good, say the critics, is the abolishment of the consultation structure such as year groups and planning groups. Blocks became one-man affairs of individual lecturers, says former programme director Pieter Caljé. It is true that most of them were positively assessed by the accreditation committee, but cohesion between the blocks has disappeared. And of course that takes its toll in the supervision of interdisciplinary theses. Caljé made a list of the complaints and sent this to the faculty board. Nothing at all was done with it, he says. Frustrating. Dean Rein de Wilde: That s incorrect, we did react within the bounds of our possibilities. Looking back, this was perhaps not enough. But I don t agree with all his conclusions. Education is not an item at the bottom of the list, and it never has been. The number of standard hours at the time was not that low, certainly compared with other faculties. In the same years, moreover, the emphasis shifted from education to research, to acquiring subsidies. This eventually led to unbalanced growth, concluded lecturer of literature Jan de Roder. In itself, this wasn t unique to FASoS. The UM president at that time, Jo Ritzen, was heading in the direction of a research university. De Wilde saw the need for this, if only because of its appeal to talented new members of staff. Alarm bells Unfortunately, it isn t long before FASoS experiences the downside of this unbalanced growth. In December 2008, three programme co-ordinators (among them the one for the bachelor s of European Studies) even raise the alarm in a letter to the faculty board. Senior staff members were apparently spending more and more time working on their research proposals for subsidies, thus buying themselves out of teaching duties. As a consequence, there is a significant lack of thesis supervisors. The co-ordinators are forced to use newly graduated master s students. And then, they write: As you all realise, for the external assessment committees that scrutinize our programmes, the quality of the bachelor s papers and master s theses constitutes an important part of their assessment. These words would turn out to be prophetic. De Wilde admits that he should have acted sooner where it concerned the re-assessment of theses. I already knew in 2011 that they would count heavily in the accreditation. But he argues against the fact that the unsatisfactory marks issued by NVAO could have been prevented with more teaching time or with more money: We should have trained our young lecturers in the supervision and assessment of theses. Also, we should never have sent our educational theorist away. Read the rest of the story in English on Wammes Bos, Riki Janssen, Maurice Timmermans

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